The Portuguese language is spoken more widely, and in a more standard form, in
Angola than in any other former Portuguese colony in Africa. In Mozambique,
where English is also important, Portuguese has spread more slowly. Creolized
dialects rule street life in Guinea Bissau and the two-island republic of São
Tomé and Príncipe. In the Cape Verde Islands, Creole is gaining ground in public
contexts, including literature. Angola owes its distinctness to two calamities:
slavery and civil war. As the source of Portugal’s slave trade to Brazil
between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Angola developed a class of
African middlemen - known, confusingly, as “Creoles” - who managed the trade for
their colonial masters. The Creoles adopted a Portuguese-speaking, Roman
Catholic culture and often intermarried with European traders. In the early
twentieth century, when large-scale European settlement of Angola began, the
Portuguese Government’ s attempts to marginalize the Creoles in order to
strengthen the settlers failed to stem mixing across racial lines. The
syncretized culture of the capital, Luanda, gave birth to the MPLA (Popular
Movement for the Liberation of Angola), the Marxist guerrilla force that went to
war against Portuguese colonialism in 1961, took power in 1975, and, under a
more opaque ideological banner, remains in power today. For most of the
country’s history, the MPLA has been at war with rival guerrilla factions, South
Africa, or Zaire. In the 1990s, when Mozambique was settling its civil war,
Angola returned to the battlefield. The worst fighting in the country’s history
drove millions of people out of rural areas into the crowded musseques
of zinc-roofed cinder block houses on the outskirts of Luanda. Here, African
languages are in retreat; most urban young people speak only Portuguese.
Reliable figures are scarce, yet with 4 million inhabitants, Luanda is probably
- after São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro - the world’s third-largest
Portuguese-speaking city.

Angola’s first President, Agostinho Neto, was both a poet and a Creole married
to a white woman: the father of the nation was also the father of three
mixed-race children. Today, when the MPLA has abandoned Marxism (even though the
streets of downtown Luanda continue to bear the names of Marx, Engels and
Lenin), the. governing party’s multicultural legacy lives on. Current
Angolan fiction, like the revolutionary leadership in the 1970s, is monopolized
by men of mixed mace, the dominant writer of the l960s and 70s, José Luandino
Vieira, a working-class white man who wrote his books during a twelve-year
incarceration in the colonial government’s concentration camps, twisted the
Portuguese language in search of an instrument to express Angolan reality.
Vieira lapsed into creative silence after Independence (he now lives as a
recluse in Portugal), but the quest for Angolanidade (“Angolanness”)
persists.

Angola’s best-known writer, Pepetela, is closely identified with this quest.
“Pepetela” became the guerrilla code-name, and later the pen-name, of Artur
Pestana, a sixth-generation Angolan of predominantly European ancestry born in
Benguela, in the country’s southern coastal region, in 1941. Trained as a
sociologist and MPLA operative in Algeria during the 1 960s, Pepetela fought as
a guerrilla for seven years, rising to the position of a regional commander
during the defence of Angola against the first South African invasion, in 1975.
From 1976 to 1982 he was Deputy Minister of Education. Pepetela’s fifteen books
have earned him large audiences in Portugal, Brazil and some European countries.
He owes his international reputation to Mayombe (1980), a tightly
observed novel about the ethnic and ideological splits and sexual tensions
afflicting a group of MPLA guerrillas. Mayombe was so controversial that
President Neto himself had to approve its publication in Angola.

In Pepetela’ s later fiction the transition from insurgency to nation-building
turns Mayombe’s portrait of ethnic strife on its head in the search for
cultural fusions capable of reconciling Angola’s diversity. In Yaka
(1984), which, like Mayombe, is available in English, a Bakongo statue
initiates a white settler family into engagement with the Angolan nation.
Lueji, o Nascimento de um Império (1989; Lueji, the Birth of an
Empire) shuttles between a retelling of the rise of the Lunda people of
north-eastern Angola to imperial grandeur in the sixteenth century and a modern
story about a mixed-race Luanda dancer, who shares the queen’s name and
struggles to put on a ballet celebrating the historical Lueji’s accomplishments.

The MPLA’s abandonment of socialism in 1990, combined with the return to war in
1992, undermined the construction of Angolanidade. A Geração da Utopia
(1992; the Utopian Generation), Pepetela’s most popular novel after Mayombe,
follows the lives of four Angolan revolutionaries from their student days in
Lisbon through the struggles of the 1970s to total disillusionment by the early
1990s. Párabola do Cágado Velho (1996; the Old Turtle’s Parable)
abandons the Creolized makers of modern Angola to tell the story of the war in
the countryside from the perspective of the African poor. A Gloriosa Família
(1997; The Glorious Famili) returns to the seventeenth century to trace the
first glimmerings of Angolanidade, as it emerged in opposition to the
Dutch occupation of Luanda between 1641 and 1648. the Van Dum family (whose name
echoes that of the Van Dúnems, the most powerful of Luanda’ s Creole dynasties)
define the culture they defend in terms of Catholicism, the Portuguese language
and their mixed racial identity. These values, presented as positive, are
undermined by the family’s brutal reliance on the slave trade. Narrated by a Van
Dum slave, the novel insists on the corruption that has always been part of the
Creole class.

A Gloriosa Família
marks the end of a cycle in Pepetela’s work in which the Creoles serve as a
model for the nation. His two recent novels about the Luanda detective Jaime
Bunda (“James Bum”), an overweight descendant of the great Creole families, turn
to satire. Pepetela is an ambitious writer, but he is rarely subtle. He has a
compelling narrative gift and a deep emotional investment in his characters. He
writes in efficient standard Portuguese, seasoned with a very mild sprinkling of
African words. His weakness is narrators who spell out for the reader insights
amply demonstrated by the action. The sardonic tone of the Jaime Bunda novels
parlays this editorializing tendency into a conduit for acerbic commentary on
contemporary corruption. The first novel, Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto
(2001), opens with the murder of a young girl on Angolan Independence Day; it
ends with a criminal mastermind, who is a high government official, seen
congratulating detectives on national television for arresting someone else for
crimes he himself has committed.

In Jaime Bunda e a morte do americano (2003; Jaime Bunda and the Death
of the American), Pepetela pokes fun at the Luanda-centrism of younger urban
Angolans by forcing Jaime to leave the capital to solve the murder of an
American engineer in Benguela. The government fears that unless the murderer is
arrested the United States will declare Angola a terrori5t nation.
The narrator warns that many Angolans continue to resent the USfor its
support of apartheid-era South Africa, although few will say so, “preferindo
hoje blandiciosas globalizações mais pós-modernistas~. (“Preferring today
appeasing globalizationsmore in the spirit of Postmodernism”). The
novel itself partakes of the postmodern spirit in being modelled on the case of
a Portuguese engineer who was murdered in Benguela in 1950. The imperial mantle
having passed from Portugal to the United States, Washington sends au PBI agent
to Benguela to shadow Jaime’s investigation. Besotted with American Popular
culture, Jaime looks forward to meeting a real FBI agent, only to have his
expectations upstaged when the agent turns out to be a light-skinned African
American woman who bears a Suspicious resemblance to Condoleezza Rice. Jaime’s
blundering attempts to seduce the agent are rebuffed when she opts for an
affair with the winner of the Miss Benguela contest. Behind this comic plot,
which shreds the Creole elite’s last pretensions to patriarchal authority a
tragedy unfolds. Júlio Fininho a young man demobilized from the army and facing
unemployment, falls in love with Maria Antónia a mixed race woman forced to
support herself through prostitution. Trapped by the manipulations surrounding
the murder investigation they see their future - and by implication that of
Angola –destroyed. The only glimmer of hope ironically lies in the postmodern
device of multiple narrators who suggest alternative solutions, the second less
grim than the first, to the mystery of the American’ s death.

Manuel Rui, also born in 1941, has followed a course similar to that of Pepetela.
A native of Huambo, in Angola’s cool central highlands, Rui is of mixed
Portuguese and Ovimbundu parentage. He practised law in Portugal while beginning
his literary career. Returning to Angola in 1974, he served as the MPLA’s
Director of Information and Propaganda, wrote the country’s national anthem and
composed au Angolan version of “The Internationale”. A collection of short
fiction from this phase of his career was published in English under the title
Yes, Comrade! (1993), but it is his later, more comic and disenchanted
work that has secured his reputation. Rui is best known for a short novel,
Quem Me Dera Ser Onda (1982; If Only I Were A Wave on the Sea). Told with
rippling light-heartedness, this satire on socialist housing policies recounts
the story of a man who is accused of “capitalist speculation” when he begins to
raise a pig in the bathroom of his flat. In comic scenes, the man’ s young
sons, motivated purely by the desire to save the pig’ s life, play havoc with
the state bureaucracy.

Rui’s latest short novel, Um Anel na Areia (2002; A Ring in the Sand),
was published just as Angola’ s forty-one years of civil war ended, Maritime
imagery emphasizes the characters’ rudderlessness, as, one by one, African
religion, Catholicism, Marxism and consumerism are discarded as moral guides in
a society where war has destroyed all systems of belief. Marina, a young
secretary, receives a gold ring from her boyfriend Lau the first time they make
love on the beach. Her response is to toss into the ocean, as an offering to the
goddess Kianda, the inferior rings she inherited from her late mother. Marina’s
colloquial interior monologues dramatize her regret at having jettisoned her
inheritance. In spite of her successful career - fluent in English and adept
with computers, she and Lau are Angola’ s potential new middle class - Marina
fears that the war may not end before Lau is conscripted. Her anxiety is
inseparable from the crisis of values that crystallizes when she loses his ring
in the sand. Neither her status-conscious aunt nor her depressed best friend can
offer reliable counsel as to how she should live her life. the tale ends with a
rhetorical question asking who is in charge and a tentative suggestion that the
family is the only institution worth saving.

José Eduardo Agualusa, also from Huambo, belongs to a different generation. Born
in 1960 to a Brazilian father and a white Angolan mother, Agualusa was
imprisoned by the MPLA in adolescence for his membership of a far-Left splinter
party. Profoundly marked by the events of 1977, when a violent internal coup
attempt sparked savage repression that left thousands dead, Agualusa roamed the
world for years as a kind of “loyal dissident”, often speaking on Angola abroad
but refusing to live in the country (he has recently moved back to Luanda).
Agualusa’s pared-down fiction extols the cultural incongruities characteristic
of Creolized societies; he has cited Bruce Chatwin as an influence. His first
novel, A conjura (1989; the Conspiracy) reconstructs a 1911 uprising
against Portuguese colonial policies that were designed to curb intercultural
mingling; his epistolary historical novel Nação Crioula (1997) was
translated into English as Creole (2003). Estação das Chuvas
(1996; Rainy Season), his most powerful work, breaks down the emotional distance
that sometimes accompanies Agualusa’s stylistic elegance, by making explicit
the narrator’s engagement in historical events.

Agualusa’s most recent novel, O Vendedor de Passados (2004; the Man Who
Sold Pasts), is narrated by a gecko clinging to the wall of the home of Félix
Ventura, a Luanda antiquarian book dealer. As an albino, Ventura is often
mistaken for a white man. taking advantage of his access to old books and
photographs, he constructs fictionalized genealogies, complete with memorabilia,
for nouveau-riche members of the Luanda elite, “proving” their Creole ancestry.
The client known as José Buehmann poses a particular challenge because he is
white. Ventura provides Buchmann with a genealogy attesting to his origins in a
white settler community in southern Angola. Accustomed to indulging the snobbish
fantasies of the new black business class, Ventura is alarmed when figures from
Buchmann’s fabricated past come to life. The gecko, meanwhile, relates his
memories of a previous life in which he was a man: not just any man, but Jorge
Luis Borges. The parallels between Buchmann and Borges the “book man”,
fuelling Agualusa’s insights into the ways in which history is created by books
but cannot be contained by them, are ingenious. Told in short, ironic scenes,
O Vendedor de Passados is consistently taut and witty. Unfortunately, the
novel’ s violent conclusion, which re-enacts the gruesome fate of the couple
who staged the 1977 coup attempt, does not emerge organically from events in
Ventura’ s bookshop; the story’s final twists feel imposed.

Both history and earlier Portuguese-language African literature influence the
work of Ondjaki, the first significant writer to emerge from the generation
that grew up with the revolution. Born Ndalu de Almeida in a mixed-race family
in Luanda in 1977, Ondjaki is the author of nine books. Some of his early work
is slight, but his autobiographical novel Bom dia camaradas (2001; Good
Morning Comrades), a bittersweet memoir of the relationship between Angolan
pupils of the 1980s and their Cuban schoolteachers, is honest and affecting.
Ondjaki’s second novel, Quantas Madrugadas Tem a Noite (2004; How Many
Dawns Has the Night), marks a large step forward. Narrated in a rough-edged
Luanda slang twisted knotty wordplay and many literary allusions, the novel
recounts the attempts to bury the deceased Adolfo Dido (the name is an obscene
pun) in the face of obstacles posed by bureaucratic obtuseness and a tropical
downpour. Adolfo claimed to have fought in the civil war (in a province bypassed
by the war); two women, each maintaining that she is his spouse, aspire to the
pension due to his “state widow”. Yet, as one character remarks, in order to
have widows, the state must be dead. Denied a decent burial, Adolfo has no
choice but to come back to life and reveal himself as the tale’s narrator. At
one level, this novel is about Angola’ s inability to bury the corpse of the
Marxist state. But it is also a celebration of the Portuguese language in
Africa; the Lisbon edition contains a glossary of three closely printed pages.
Ondjaki’s voice recalls the stories of Luandino Vieira; there are allusions to
the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, to Pepetela, to Brazilian novels. In its
boundless energy, Quantas Madrugadas Tem a Noite illustrates that
contemporary Angolan fiction is responding not only to history, but to an
evolving literary tradition.

Healing words of Angola's warrior writer

Despite
being a frail-looking intellectual, Pepetela fought in the Angolan war, and
lived to write about it. His latest book looks back over 80 years of history,
writes Stephen Gray

Ten years ago, on neutral ground - in Rome, at a
conference of African writers - I was fortunate to meet the sole Angolan
representative, Artur dos Santos from Luanda. In that Franco-Anglo-Italian
milieu, his Portuguese was a minor language; his translator helpfully clung to
him. We took a long walk under the chestnuts, agreeing off the record that,
although our countries were at war, we were not enemies.

So this
frail, studious-looking, mildest of men was the MPLA cadre who had fought in the
liberation struggle in the Cabinda enclave. His novel about that - Mayombe,
which had just been released in English and has now been republished - featured
himself rather humorously as a character called Theory the Teacher, the
intellectual who proved he too could shoot and loot in the guerrilla campaign. I
was awestruck.

His
nom de guerre at the front was "Pepetela", under which he still writes and
publishes. He had flown back into Angola on that first plane after liberation -
a key moment in his book, Yaka, as it turns out - become an
under-minister for education and an organiser of the Angolan Writers Union.
Today he is his country's leading novelist, much rewarded.

When he
spoke at that conference, his subject was the five centuries of the Portuguese
language in Africa. The city youth there, he said, had now really taken it as
their own - the language of Camoens was being "re-arranged" to answer back its
own oppressors.

He
conceded that new readers in Angola were still more familiar with developments
in mainland Portugal than with the literature of their neighbouring (previously
French) Congo, or with that of South Africa for that matter, but that was the
colonial aftermath. He described himself as a mestizo (of mixed-race
origin): thus, a negotiator and go-between.

Yaka,
the novel he was publishing then - all about the Portuguese and mixed-race
communities of Benguela, where he was born in 1941 - is at last out in English,
in an exemplary translation by Marga Holness (published by Heinemann African
Writers Series).

At last
because, were it not for the language barrier and the aggravating time-lag,
Yaka would have been long established as a touchstone, a healing work in
divided Southern Africa, one of our most important fictional documents. Its
tumbling, wonderful action ends with a plain demonstration of just how
inter-connected political events are on the ground in the subcontinent - with
the South African invasion and occupation in 1975 of that godforsaken
slave-port, no less. Literary rapprochement always comes later.

Yaka
concerns the previous 85 years of the life of Alexandre Semedo, the son of an
exiled Portuguese convict sent to civilise the blacks, born in a Boer ox-wagon
en route to the pestilential port. The midwife drops the babe and the first
thing he eats is earth - Angolan soil, his patrimony. On the wagon is the trophy
of the yaka, a sculptured fetish which bears witness to the ensuing family saga,
and which proves Semedo's only enduring companion. The yaka is a fiendish
caricature of the colonial violator, partly of himself, which he apostrophises
in his loneliness.

Through
five looping cycles the novel proceeds, with great ironic power, as each
generation sees fit to repeat and even embellish the fights and follies of the
preceding one. Cattle-raids, rapes, revanchism, rebellions - these are the
recurring events, painted in fine, loving detail.

Pepetela
really does understand how all that gruesome history came about and maintained
itself. That he can also find the funny side of it ("But if you kill them all,
who is going to do the work?"), and persuade the reader to share it, is greatly
to his credit. Never belaboured, here one follows with fascination the collapse
of the rubber market and the recovery in coffee, the coming of the railways and
the New State of Salazar, all the way to the inevitable civil war.

In the
foreground are always engrossing, credible and rather astonishing people of
Benguela. There is Father Horacio, who believes in the concept of reproducing
mulattos to ensure the growth of the Catholic Church; Acacio the anarchist
barber, whose funeral causes a race riot; and Isidro the revolutionary poet,
dropped into the Atlantic from the belly of a plane.

From his
adobe home and general store, Semedo himself produces not only a (white) family
of soccer hooligans and buffalo-hunters (read: kaffir-killers), but an
unacknowledged (coloured) one as well. The latter rather manages to redeem the
whole shebang at the close.

They all
keep some control of their under-developed hinterland by wielding the crudest of
threats, used wonderfully satirically: there are the menacing English putting
down the slave-trade, then the Germans in South-West, even the Protestant
proselytisers in the steamy jungle. Any rallying call will do to subdue that
inner fear of losing a toehold on the vast, always promising interior.

When the
old man's divided brood crate up to evacuate to the motherland, or are in convoy
overland to South Africa, he is left with only one great-grandson - freckled,
rebellious little Joel. Their accumulated history, bigger than both of them, has
seen to it that only Joel is destined to become a true Angolan: fearless, agile
and - the point of the whole exercise - almost unbearably knowledgeable. The
future is his, the past this museum of a book.

I found
the closing pages of Yaka, as the gaga old coward spilt all those years
of worm-eaten beans and watered-down wine to the last of his progeny, so
touching I could hardly bear more. The pleasure of a grand, left-wing analysis
done so skilfully gave way, well, to deep tears.

The tears
of hope that only the very great, deepest literary work can summon, when one
knows it is accurate and its artistry has ambushed one's heart.